Monthly Archives: August 2017

August 28, 2017   Personal Development   No comments

How to Budget for Retirement

Before you spend, earn.
Before you invest, investigate.
Before you quit, try.
Before you retire, save.

– William Arthur Ward

The Magic Number

Whole books have been written about how much money is needed to retire. Many websites have retirement calculators that will tell you how much you need to retire. This is the so-called magic number – the net worth you will need to retire. Based on this number, many calculators will even tell you how much you should be saving for retirement or how much you should be contributing to your (subsidized) savings plan. Other apps will calculate your retirement risk. They may calculate the odds that you will run out of money in retirement by a certain age, or they may tell you what investment mix provides the optimal risk for you. In order to properly discuss the magic number, we will need a little background information.

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August 27, 2017   Personal Development   No comments

How to Budget for a Wedding

Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The average cost of a wedding is now about €25,000. Many couples spend significantly more. Clearly this is a large sum of money and a good candidate for a budget review. Yet unlike a vacation, it is not quite so easy to restrict wedding expenses into a tight budget. First of all, most people expect (or at least hope) that their wedding is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, which is worthy of a once-in-a-lifetime expense. Second, wedding expenses involve a diverse set of emotional items, from childhood dreams to family traditions to social expectations.

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August 26, 2017   Personal Development   No comments

How to Budget for a Vacation

A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you have been taking.

— Earl Wilson

Let us talk about vacation!

This Post is Not About Cheap Travel Deals

First of all, let us make sure we have understood the title of this post. This article is not about how to save money on your vacation. (The world does not really need yet another 200 word blog post that repeats the same “10 Ways To Save Money” bullets from every other article.) This post is about how to plan ahead for vacation costs, how to work a vacation into your budget, and how to stick to the vacation budget that you have set. Indirectly, of course, you may save money by sticking to your budget and not spending more than you intended.

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August 26, 2017   Financial Investments   No comments

How to Budget for a House

A man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.

— John Foster Dulles

Start with Principal and Interest

This is your purchase price spread out over the length of the loan along with the finance cost of delaying the payments from the date of purchase. For example, if you buy a €200,000 house with a 10% down payment, and you borrow with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage at 4% interest, then your monthly PI (principal + interest) = €859.35. This is the one part of your housing cost that is constant and predictable, but unfortunately there are many other costs.

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